A Study Of Discourse Power In College Oral English Classroom

"Power"and"Solidarity"are applied to stand for the social distance between participants in a discourse."Power"concerns the vertical disparity between the participants in a hierarchical structure while"Solidarity"concerns the minimal social distance between people."Power"and"Solidarity"exist in the language in use.A harmonious discourse power relation in class is vital to maintain harmonious teacher-student relationship. Discourse power relationship between teachers and students in college oral English classroom has been a focus in education circle. Many linguists have done research. In 1970s, J. M. Sinclair and others put forward a classroom discourse analysis model, i.e., the Birmingham model, the most influential representative. They believe in classroom, a class has a strict hierarchical structure of discourse: lesson, transaction, exchange, move, and then act.Based on the Birmingham model, combined with social linguistics, critical discourse analysis and discourse power theories, by using classroom audio and video, issuing questionnaires, interviews, etc., this thesis chooses the discourse extracts from 6 Oral English classes of Shaoxing University whose"College English"course has been granted Provincial Excellent Level Course Construction Project by Zhejiang Province. Ten teachers and 240 students from the project were given an interview and a questionnaire respectively. By analyzing the teacher-student discourse and student-student discourse, the paper focuses on the dominant and hidden power relations in the hierarchical structures of a discourse from four aspects: discourse amount, teachers'questions, teacher-student discourse distance and student-student discourse distance in a quantitative and qualitative way. The findings show: firstly, the discourse structure in oral English classes at the university is broadly in line with the Birmingham model; secondly, teachers discourse power in classroom plays a key role in managing a big class; thirdly, a certain proportion exists between discourse power relations and students language competence (proficiency); fourthly, two contradictory situations concerning discourse power in class are common, i.e. one is"given-by-teacher but neglected-by-student", the other"wanted-by-student but neglected-by-teacher", which result in the imbalances of power relations and this thesis gives a brief analysis of the two conflicting cases.Based on the findings and implications from the empirical analysis, this paper puts forward some suggestions. Discourse power relations in classroom is not static, and teachers can apply power theory to college English teaching and use a variety of strategies to balance the power relations between the teacher and students and the power among students to achieve discourse harmony—a relative dynamic balance of discourse power relations.